In 1948, Claude Shannon, a young engineer and mathematician working at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, published "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," a seminal paper that marked the birth of information theory. In ...

Over the last 150 years, humans have wrought sweeping changes to the Great Plains. What was once the prairie is now the Corn Belt-row crops planted from fencerow to fencerow. What does this mean for the native wildlife, ...

This is the story of the language of eyes - what they say about our emotions, what they reveal about our intentions, how they interact with our face, and how they connect us to one another. The story follows our experience ...

This thesis considers the ways in which digital game mechanics (interactive inputs) contribute to games' worldbuilding. In particular, this work is concerned with the replication and reinforcement of problematic gender ...

In the 1960's, psychedelic drugs were a part of not only popular culture, but also cuttingedge psychology research. Scientists were studying these drugs in the hope of understanding and treating various psychological and ...

Cultural theorists such as Henry Jenkins¹, Lawrence Lessig², Yochai Benkler³ , Robert Hassan⁴, and Manuel Castells⁵, have written extensively on the role of network communications technologies in reconfiguring contemporary ...

The rocks on which the city of Boston was built did not form as part of North America. They formed about 600 million years ago, at the South Pole, as the northern coast of a supercontinent called Gondwanaland. Boston's ...

We don't often think of modern American communities as places that disappear. But lead pollution erased the tiny Texas community of Smeltertown from the map. And Smeltertown isn't alone. Across America we've scraped ...

Technology use-particularly the use of the Internet-is a pervasive component of modem society. The Internet has changed the way we work and the way we play, creating new possibilities for self expression and communication. ...

The current biofuels market in the United States is dominated by ethanol made from corn. But corn ethanol has limitations that will prevent it from displacing a large amount of fossil fuel use in the U.S. To achieve that ...

Human hand transplantation became a medical reality at the turn of the 2 1st century. Often hailed by media and the general public as miraculous, these life-changing surgeries are also highly controversial. Many doctors, ...

A few decades ago, black holes were a theoretical quirk. Highly probable on paper, they were doubted more than touted; many scientists didn't believe they even existed. Today, however, black holes appear to be everywhere, ...

A number of research groups worldwide are working on various aspects of the problem of building life from scratch. Jack W. Szostak's lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts is one of the centers of the action. Open a recent news ...

Prenatal diagnosis has given doctors the ability to predict problems before a child is even born. But what happens when the information gleaned from these tests is that the child is fatally sick? Doctors call these "futile" ...

Grigori Perelman, a reclusive Russian mathematician, may have proved the Poincare Conjecture, a statement first poised by Jules Henri Poincare in 1902. The problem is the most eminent challenge in the mathematical field ...

In 1984, the FDA approved a medical device called a cochlear implant for adult use in the United States. Unlike assistive hearing technologies that came before it, such as hearing aids, cochlear implants could offer wider ...

Octopuses are extraordinary creatures: Despite their numerous biological divergences from humans, they display impressive intelligence. Aquarists and scientists alike have noted instances of octopuses having what appear ...

On May 25, 1979, an American Airlines DC-10 crashed just after taking off from Chicago's O'Hare Airport. It was the worst crash in U.S. history at the time, having killed all 271 people on board and two people on the ground. ...

Progeria is a genetic aging disease of childhood affecting an estimated one in four to eight million births. Children with progeria experience a range of developmental disorders and aging-like symptoms, including wrinkled ...